1979

by Ray Robertson

  Religion—that’s where he and his church came in—to apply the metaphysical frosting to the whole festering fraud. Three out of four Sundays a month being dutifully bored in the third pew from the back and you’re set for eternity, save the spiritual growth and wider ethical-awareness stuff for someone who’s got the time, Holy Joe.

  He’d worked his way through his undergrad at Queen’s as a waiter; he’d gone to Harvard Divinity on an academic scholarship he’d earned by getting by on four hours of sleep and eating ketchup sandwiches and living at the library; he’d believed every word they taught him in graduate school about souls to save, consciences to salve, lives to enrich. He graduated in 1967 with high distinction and immediately secured his present position at Saint Andrew’s United Church in Chatham, Ontario. Some people were calling it the Summer of Love. Some people weren’t being facetious.

  Was it really only twelve years ago that he came here?

  And on the eighth day God wondered what the point was.

  ~

  Ordinarily I would have forced Dale to listen to my new record, The Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach as performed by Glenn Gould, Columbia Masterworks, $7.99. It was the last copy Sam the Record Man had. It was the only copy Sam the Record Man had. It sat in the same slim bin marked CLASSICAL & OTHER as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Ravel’s Bolero, The Complete Nutcracker Suite, and the soundtrack to the movie A Clockwork Orange. The guy behind the counter wearing the Doobie Brothers T-shirt studied me like he was going to ask me for identification, like I wanted to buy cigarettes or beer and not a record. Handing over my change and the plastic-bagged LP, “Enjoy it,” he said. It sounded like a dare.

  I took it home and listened to it (and listened to it), but I couldn’t hear it; not like I had in the health-food store, anyway. Its wonderful, delicate strangeness had dissolved upon repeated listening into familiar bewilderment, the maddening simplicity of the music anything but simple to understand. But I kept playing it—while lying in bed reading, while sitting at my desk doing homework—because although I couldn’t comprehend it, I could feel it. What I was feeling wasn’t so obvious—calm elation, pleasant confusion, gentle, elevating sorrow—but something, anyhow, that made me feel good, made me want to keep listening. You didn’t have to force yourself to do things that felt good.

  I always listened alone. Alone was the best way to listen to a record or read a book—by yourself you were stuck with yourself, was just you and the music or the words and whatever emotions or ideas echoed around inside—but sometimes it was nice to borrow somebody else’s ears or eyes to help to better understand what you’d heard or read. Like, when I’d take a Bach break and play Pink Floyd’s The Wall or Queen’s News of the World, why, even though my foot never stopped tapping the entire time they were playing, when the LP came off the turntable, did my mind feel like I’d chewed a piece of Double Bubble that had lost all of its flavour, that all that was left was pointless chewing and chewing? Chances were that Dale had never heard The Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach as performed by Glenn Gould, but chances were that even if he had—if we were still best friends and he’d come over and I’d played it for him—he’d be hearing Sarah’s voice and seeing Sarah’s face, not the music. Being in love didn’t leave much time for anything else.

  I could have asked Allison to come over and listen—she wasn’t my girlfriend, but I spent more time with her than with anyone else these days—but whenever I thought of it, something in my gut didn’t feel right. It wasn’t because I was nervous or worried that she’d say no; more like, if she said yes, she might be bored by what she heard or I might be bored by what she said about what she heard and either way it might ruin our running relationship. I liked jogging. I liked how when you were done for the day you felt sweaty empty yet filled up at the same time. I liked jogging in the cemetery. I liked how being around so many dead people somehow made you feel more alive. I liked Allison. I liked how, even though she was a girl, it didn’t feel like it, we’d just run and sometimes talk and then say See you later when we were done, just like two regular friends.

  The only person I could imagine listening to Bach with was Mom. She’d never been musical, the radio was the only thing she played, but during the period she started spending as much time at the Cornerstone church as she had with us, one day she brought home a couple of cassette tapes Pastor Bob had loaned her.

  I guess they were what are called hymns—choir music, men and women singing together to celebrate the glory of God to simple organ accompaniment—and Mom took to playing them over and over on the living-room stereo. It was the beginning of her being born again, and Dad, I think, put up with the nearly non-stop music because he didn’t want to seem entirely negative about whatever she was going through. Maybe he thought that if he didn’t push back too hard, she’d eventually get God out of her system. When God and Jesus and Pastor Bob became more important than Dad and Julie and me, however, he gave up sharing his house with the Holy Spirit and wouldn’t allow her to play the tapes when he was around.

  Dad worked long hours at the shop downtown and Julie and I would be home from school long before he’d return for our customarily late supper. The sound of voices raised together in song in praise of His greatness would greet us as we came through the door, aural accompaniment to the milk and cookies Mom would have waiting on the counter. Julie would roll her eyes and take her after-school snack to her bedroom and close the door and usually put on Tommy, the album about the pinball kid who was deaf, dumb, and blind. I was six and didn’t have my own stereo or records yet, so I’d sit on a stool at the kitchen counter and eat my cookies and drink my milk and watch Mom clean up or do her supper prep as she sang along with the music.

  I didn’t think of God or Jesus Christ or heaven while I listened—didn’t see pictures in my head of an old white-bearded man in the sky or Jesus on the cross or billowy, cloud-pillowy heaven—I just felt…peaceful. Part of it was probably the cookies and milk, part of it was probably Mom being so happily-humming busy, but part of it was also the music, all of the different voices coming together like one great big voice, nothing jagged or sad or sour in the melodies and notes they sang, everything pushing upward, up, up, up. Mom would see me smiling and she’d look even happier, would hug me and ask me if I wanted another cookie and maybe some more milk. Yes, please, I’d say, and the music would keep playing.

  Everybody was talking about it: an eclipse, a chance to see the sun disappear behind the moon. Or something like that. The weather woman on TV every night and an old man who hung around Mr. Coleman’s antique glass shop next door seemed excited to explain what was going to happen, but I tried not to understand. I’d only come in to give Mr. Coleman his newspaper.

  “So, you see,” the old man said, “it can either be a full eclipse or a partial eclipse. People say ‘eclipse of the sun’ like it’s the same thing, but it’s not.”

  “Uh huh,” I said.

  The old man wore a mothbally cardigan over top checkered suspenders and a brown polyester shirt buttoned nearly to the top.

  “And, you see, when the moon does block it, that’s what’s called ‘occulting’ the sun. I bet you didn’t know that, did you?” He winked at Mr. Coleman who was busy cleaning a bottle with a rag and some smelly liquid from a can.

  “Now, keep in mind, this can only happen during a new moon, when the sun and moon are what they call ‘in conjunction’ with one another. You follow?”

  “Uh huh.”

  Not knowing something took almost as much concentration as its opposite, but in this case it was worth it. Reading in the newspaper that someone had died wasn’t so bad if you didn’t know them personally. The earth’s life source might be a cosmic corpse in waiting, but that didn’t mean I needed to become any more familiar with the deceased-to-be than I already was. Besides, if people knew what was going to happen when the sun vanished for real one day, chances were they woul
dn’t be so goofy-giddy about witnessing its phony disappearance now. The other big space story that year was the American Sky Lab, which was supposed to crash through our planet’s atmosphere at any time and come hurtling to earth. It seemed kind of… rude—the Americans had put tons of steel and stuff up there, and now that it had done its job it was the entire world’s problem when it came crashing down—but the scientists were now saying that all of that space junk was probably going to fall somewhere over Australia, so nobody I knew was too worried about it anymore.

  I couldn’t remember anyone actually buying anything from Mr. Coleman’s store; people would come in just to talk and listen to the big band music he played on his eight-track machine and to suffer the stinky clouds of Old Port cigar smoke that puffed from his mouth. Everywhere you looked in the store there were old beer and whisky bottles with strange names like The Viking Brewery and J. Gundlach Wines and Brandies and pop bottles with embossed names like Azule Seltzer and Bay City Soda that you could feel with the tip of your finger, and smaller bottles, like the one Mr. Coleman was cleaning, that once upon a time had contained something Mr. Coleman called stomach bitters and health serums, and that had even weirder names like Dr. Harvey’s Blood Cleanser and Dr. Henley’s Eye Opener.

  “Did any of those things ever work?” I said. I didn’t really care, but I thought if I got Mr. Coleman talking, the mothbally old man might drop his unasked-for astronomy lesson.

  “People kept making them, so people must have kept buying them.” Mr. Coleman chewed on the white plastic tip of his cigar. He was an old man too, around sixty I guessed, but wore his full head of black hair greased back like a character on Happy Days. And he didn’t wear old-man clothes—usually a very clean white T-shirt and blue jeans with rolled up cuffs and pointy black boots.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But did they work? I mean, did people get better after they drank them?”

  “Oh, probably not.” He picked up a squat, square-shaped bottle off the counter. “Take a look at this,” he said. He handed me the bottle and I read the embossed name on its side: Burrill’s Tooth Powder. None of these old bottles had paper labels like modern ones did. It must have been a lot harder to engrave each one as opposed to just slapping a piece of paper on it. I ran my finger over the name.

  “How old is it?” I said.

  Mr. Coleman took the bottle from me, looked at it, turned it around in the palm of his hand. “Turn of the century, for sure.” He adjusted his cigar with his other hand so he could gnaw on its plastic tip. “A little haze, a little cloudy, but that’s to be expected… the metal cap is a bit corroded… but no cracks, not even any chips or dings.” He was talking to me, but it was as if he were talking to himself.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Coley,” the old man said. “Don’t work too hard.” Some people, if they couldn’t hear their own voice, didn’t want to hear anything else.

  Mr. Coleman didn’t say goodbye, kept inspecting the bottle, kept chewing on his cigar. The bell on the door tinkled as the old man let himself out. I felt like I was intruding, that I should leave Mr. Coleman alone with his old medicine bottle.

  Mr. Coleman set it down on the counter; readjusted his cigar so he could take a deep pull. He picked up his newspaper and exhaled smoke and sighed at the same time. “Let’s see what kind of nonsense the world is up to today,” he said. A pair of black reading glasses hung around his neck by a string and he placed them on his nose.

  Before he could start reading, “How much does that bottle cost?” I said. He looked at me over his glasses.

  “What do you want an old piece of glass for?” he said.

  “I don’t know.” It wasn’t much of an answer, but it was the truth.

  Mr. Coleman looked at me the way he looked at one of his bottles. “How old are you?” he said.

  “Thirteen. Almost fourteen”

  “Almost fourteen. And how long… how old were you when you got lost? Lost down there.”

  “Seven.”

  “Seven years,” he said. “You’ve been who you are now for just as long as you were before.”

  “I guess.” Before me and afterwards me still felt like me—I wished it wasn’t the case, I wished I was different and felt like somebody else, somebody transformed, but I didn’t. But if Mr. Coleman needed to think there was that big a difference, that was okay too.

  “Not everybody knows what it’s like to be gone and then to come back, do they?” he said.

  I just shrugged, but I knew it was enough.

  Handing me the bottle, “Take it,” he said.

  “But it’s old. It must be worth a lot.”

  “Take it,” he said, almost smiling this time. “Or I’m liable to change my mind.”

  I took it and thanked him and placed it in my newspaper bag and was five minutes into my route when I realized it wasn’t worth the risk, I had better go back home and leave it in my bedroom. It was nearly a hundred years old. There was no guarantee it wasn’t going to break one day anyway, but that didn’t mean I shouldn’t avoid being careless when I could.

  Motorcycle Crash Claims Life of Man’s Son, His Marriage, His Reason to Live

  “I Like Looking at Glass Now. I Like

  Looking at Old Glass”

  HIS WIFE SAID to him that that was it, one was enough, if he wanted to have any more children, then he could have them himself. A little brother or a sister for one-year-old Barry would have been nice, but Barry was enough. Barry was better than enough. Barry was perfect. Taking a nap before his afternoon shift at Ontario Steel with baby Barry asleep on his chest, So this is what happiness is, he thought. Sometimes at work or cutting the lawn or filling up the tank of the Buick, he’d catch himself smiling and wouldn’t be able to remember why he was supposed to be happy. Then he’d remember their son.

  Babies, of course, learn to walk and talk and demand money for rock-and-roll concerts, but even when the boy wasted his allowance on gas money and a ticket to see the band du jour across the border at Cobo Hall in Detroit—paying for the right to be deafened: unfathomable—he was still a good boy, never came home high or drunk like some people’s kids and always when he said he’d be back. When his son saw Easy Rider and caught the motorcycle bug his father promised to buy him a used Yamaha from a guy at work for his graduation (so proud, so proud; neither he nor his wife had managed to finish high school). His wife said no no no until the day it was parked in the driveway, the second day of summer vacation, June 11, 1970.

  The day started the way it was supposed to—sunny, dry, a slight wind out of the west—but the weatherman hadn’t said anything about rain. Barry had gotten his licence after taking riding lessons with the money he earned working part-time at a car wash, his father had brought the bike to a garage and had it fully inspected, repaired, and tuned up, and even his mother was somewhat assuaged when Barry promised to always wear his helmet when he rode. But the weatherman hadn’t said anything about rain. It was only a light sprinkle—barely there even, almost a mist—but it wasn’t supposed to happen, there wasn’t supposed to be any precipitation at all.

  The phone call from the police, the funeral, the first echoey empty days afterward: waylaying grief gave them a week or so of being too busy and bewildered to properly feel their pain. When it finally arrived, though, he wanted to howl like a tormented animal incapable of anything else. His wife began pouring her first water glass of Canadian Mist whiskey earlier and earlier each day, immediately washing the glass and putting it in the drying rack before pouring out her next drink twenty minutes later her sole concession to keeping up appearances. By the time he arrived home from work and they’d shared another silent supper she was drunk enough to begin reminding him whose idea the motorcycle was and what wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t. What was once their home was now too big for just the two of them and too small for their shared sorrow, anger, and exhaustion. She kept the house, he moved
into a large apartment downtown next door to a tattoo parlor, and there wasn’t any reason for them to keep in touch. He didn’t get a telephone installed, swore he’d never have another. If bad news wanted to find him in the future it was going to have to work a hell of a lot harder than simply traveling down a telephone wire.

  Every abandoned shoe in the street was a tragic poem; every undercooked TV dinner he ate, every sour hangover he endured, every dull day again and again, all that he deserved. Until one day, putting out the trash, he spotted an old, squat bottle resting on top of the neighbour’s overflowing garbage can.

  Canadian Liquid Hair Dye

  Prepared Only by Northrop and Lyman

  Toronto Ontario

  Warranted to Color Grey or Light Hair to a Beautiful Auburn, Brown, or Black, with All the Softness of the Original Hair.

  1896

  Just one more Buy me! Buy me! piece of bullshit no different from the same shit, different day products of today, but he stuck it in his pocket anyway and put it on his coffee table. One night after work, instead of turning on the TV, he drank a six pack and looked at the bottle. The next morning, What the fuck is wrong with me? he thought. A grown man doesn’t do things like that.

  Six months and an apartment full of old milk, medicine, pop, beer, and hair-tonic bottles later, he filled out all of the necessary paperwork for early retirement from the factory and rented out the empty store downstairs and Coleman’s Antique Bottles became downtown Chatham’s latest struggling business. He didn’t care. The rent was next to nothing and his pension cheques from Ontario Steel, even at the significantly reduced rate he’d agreed to, were enough to see him through. The main thing was that he had enough room now. Truth be told, he got more excited about buying a new, rare bottle at a trade show in Toronto or Buffalo or Detroit than he did selling one out of his shop. Sometimes he’d wonder what had happened, how things had ended up the way they were. Eventually he quit asking.